Love post – First Anniversary

November 4, 2018

If I wrote a book titled How to Meet and Marry Your Soulmate in Just 50 Years, do you think it would sell? I think back to myself at eighteen. He would not have bought that book. He needed God to come through much sooner than that.

At eighteen, I prayed, believing I would receive the wife that God had matched to me, because the Bible promised it. What scriptures are there to promise a wife?

It is not good for the man to be alone (Gen. 2:18).

She is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone (Gen 2:24).

He who finds a wife finds a good thing and obtains favor from the LORD (Prov. 18:22).

Houses and wealth are inherited from parents, but a prudent wife is from the LORD (Prov. 19:14).

It is better to marry than to burn (1 Cor. 7:9).

Oh, yeah. That last one. I was eighteen years old. You know what it’s like at that age. Hormones were driving a lot of these prayers. But more than that I wanted to find my rib, the woman who would be flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone. In other words, my soulmate. If you want God to introduce you to your Miss Right, you can’t settle for Miss Right-Now. At least that was what I was taught. I wanted to finish college and get a career before I got married. There was some waiting involved. I understood that and accepted it. I figured it would be worth it if I married the woman God intended for me.

But the waiting was much longer than I thought it would be, and it took a toll on my relationship with God. I blamed God for all the years of frustration, opportunities missed, and the ticking of my biological clock. You don’t hear men talk about that, but at a certain age I saw my potency slipping away from me. How was I going to have children? If God were going to answer that prayer of mine, you’d think God would have made it happen in time that my (still nonexistent) wife and I could have made that choice. God promised to grant the desires of my heart (Psalm 37:4). I listened to preachers who set up those expectations for me, and it just made the disappointment greater.

Why is the game of love so hard to win?

There are some things I understand now that I did not understand then. My mom summed it up when she told me, “You will never find another woman who’s a better fit for you than Fran.” She never said that about any of my previous girlfriends. And with good reason. She was right on both counts, as mothers usually are.

When you are with the right person, you don’t have to talk yourself into it. You don’t have to make excuses for all the ways they make you miserable. The thought of spending my whole life with other girlfriends made me scared. There was too much drama with them. With Fran, the thought of spending the rest of my life with her made me happy. More and more, I got the feeling she was what had been missing in my life. She was both my true love and my best friend. In other words, my soulmate. I had a hard time understanding why my other relationships did not work out. Now, I know. I just did not know what it looked like to be with the right woman until I met Fran.

It was about thirty years later when the prayers of that eighteen-year-old were finally answered. In all that time, I’ve learned the game of trying to find the love of your life is so unfair. You don’t know what it looks like to be with her until you actually meet her. Before then, the rush of being in love can easily fool you. With all my previous girlfriends, there were moments when I thought they could be the one, but we just were not good matches for the long term. Eventually I figured that out. That saved me from marrying the wrong person. But each time it left me frustrated, wondering when will I meet the right person. For a long time, I resented God for making me wait so long.

People would tell me, “It will happen when you don’t expect it.” I did not see how that was possible. Every time I met a new woman, I noticed two things: Is she attractive, and does she have a wedding ring. I got some of them to go out with me, but it never worked out. Eventually, I got so frustrated I gave up completely. So God said, “It is not good for man to be alone”? Apparently God did not include me in that. I resigned myself to a fate of being single my whole life. And then I met her, and fate changed its mind.

Newlyweds

What I like most so far is how natural it feels for us to be together. I don’t think about being married the same way I don’t think about breathing. It’s just the way it’s supposed to be. Occasionally, people will remind me, though. Friends or family will ask, “How’s married life?” “Great,” I tell them with a smile. When we tell people we are newlyweds, they are always happy for us. That has been fun. I figured we could keep it going for the first year. A year has passed, and I’m wondering if I can still keep it going.

When something feels natural, though, the danger is in taking it for granted. If anything good has come of waiting so long, it’s that I think it’s impossible to take her for granted. We went to a writer’s group in Buford, Georgia back in May. I talked to one of the men there. He said he has been married fourteen years and still considers himself a newlywed. So my plan now is to keep thinking of us as newlyweds, at least for thirteen more years. And then . . . maybe another fourteen years?

Show Don’t Tell

Writers hear the saying “Show don’t tell” all the time. What that means is you don’t tell what the character is feeling. You show it in their actions, physical response, facial expressions, body language, etc. Instead of saying, “He was worried,” or “He was anxious,” you might say, “His brow furrowed.” Fran says I had a furrowed brow when we first met. Now that furrow is gone. What does that show you? For me, it shows how much my relationship with God has healed.

It also shows I didn’t know how much I needed her until I knew her.

What if?

If there was one thing I could have changed, it would be having a child or two of my own, in my thirties or maybe late twenties. That ship has sailed. It’s highly unlikely at this point that we would have any children together, unless God pulls an Isaac on us. And I don’t think I would have the energy or desire for it now.

I had no idea that what I was asking for was harder than I thought. I wanted a relationship and a marriage the way it was in the Garden before the Fall. She was flesh of his flesh, bone of his bone. They matched on every level: spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically. If I had just asked for a wife because it is better to marry than to burn, maybe it would not have taken so long. I might have been able to get married in college to satisfy those yearnings. But I asked for more.

When I got married, I wanted it to be right in every way, and I wanted it to be for life. The vast majority of couples, when they get married, don’t think they’ll get divorced. They think it will be for life. And yet, over 50% of marriages end in divorce. Why? I don’t have the answer, and I’m not in a position to judge anyone. If I had married one of my previous girlfriends, I’m sure we would have ended up divorced. I just didn’t want my marriage to be part of that statistic. That meant I needed a woman I connected with on every level.

What if God had said to my eighteen-year-old self, “I can give you your heart’s desire. It’s going to take time before it is right for the two of you to come together. I won’t promise you will be able to have children when it happens”? Would I have taken that?

I might have asked a couple of questions, like, “Why is it taking so long? If you can turn stones into children of Abraham, surely there is more than one woman in the world who can be my wife. If she doesn’t exist yet, take one of my ribs and make her like you did from Adam.”

And God might have said something like, “I haven’t worked that way since the Fall. She does exist. All I am promising is that in the fullness of time, you will meet the desire of your heart.”

“How long is that?”

“In the fullness of time.”

Chronos and Kairos

When you pray for something, it’s really hard to pin down an exact time from God. Look at all the times throughout history someone thought they had figured the exact time of the Rapture, and it still hasn’t happened. So when will it happen? Just like the first advent of Christ happened in the fullness of time, the second advent will happen the same way. So stop trying to calculate when.

In Greek, there are two different words for time: Chronos (quantitative time) and Kairos (qualitative time). We live in Chronos, where time is measured in seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months, etc. God operates in Kairos, which means it happens at the right time.

At eighteen I was in Virginia, and she was in South Carolina. The time was not right for us to come together. It took about thirty years to make it happen. As we got to know each other, we learned that all the while, God was slowly, imperceptibly moving us toward each other, so that at the right time, we finally met. It would take a whole other post to tell how it all worked together, but it was enough to convince me whether I believed it or not, God kept working to make it happen at the right time.

Since then it has been a lot easier to trust that God is working everything in my life – even my most frustrating and painful moments – for good, as Romans 8:28 says. So when I ask why God didn’t give me children, if I believe God knew what He was doing better than I did, there must be a reason. I don’t know the reason, and I don’t have to, because even that was something God did for my good. I couldn’t always believe that. But my relationship with God has healed to the point that now I can.

Infinity

This is a famous passage from The Fault In Our Stars, by John Green, first a book and later made into a movie.

“There are infinite numbers between 0 and 1. There’s .1 and .12 and .112 and an infinite collection of others. Of course, there is a bigger infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2, or between 0 and a million. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities. A writer we used to like taught us that. There are days, many of them, when I resent the size of my unbounded set. I want more numbers than I’m likely to get, and God, I want more numbers for Augustus Waters than he got. But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.”

Remember that statistic about 50% of marriages ending in divorce? That hasn’t been true in my family, including extended families. At family reunions, I have great aunts and uncles who have been married fifty, sixty, seventy years. Some who have outlived their spouses. I have cousins who got married at a “normal age” and are still with the same person. A few were divorced and remarried, but not many.

Fran and I will complete our first year of marriage this weekend. It’s very unlikely – unless God does something incredible – that we will live to be married as long as my grandparents were, my parents have been, her parents have been, and of course my many great aunts and uncles and even some cousins have been. I don’t know how long we will have together before one or both of us leaves this world. In comparing the length of time we will have together versus what they have already had, and will have, our Chronos looks so small. John Green reminds me here that no matter how short the time, in Kairos she has already given me infinity within the numbered days. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world.